Writing about the difficulties of sharing knowledge, and considering the intial attempts to "capture" knowledge in a repository, I came across this great quote by Jay Cross in his book "Informal Learning- rediscovering the natural pathways that inspire innovation and performance", which I thought really summed up the reason why the KM knowledge repository idea has failed.
“You can no more capture true knowledge in a repository that you can trap lightening in a box”.
2 comments:
Is Wikipedia not a good example of how knowledge can be captured in a repository? Over a very short space of time, this has become a first port of call for me when I want a starting point to understand almost anything from the serious to the trivial?
Within organisations, I believe the challenge to be how you overcome the "knowledge is power" syndrome where people view knowledge sharing is seen as eroding their power bases.
I take your point about Wikipedia Simon, I guess it can be defined as a knowledge repository - but I think it's more of an information repository. It doesn't include the personal elements of knowledge, the context, the "tacit" elements. Wikipedia is the "what" rather than the "how to" of knowledge.
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